Tactics to Influence Keywords in Google's "Search Suggest" / Autocomplete in Instant?

[scodtt]

That link goes to a godaddy holding page...

I did go and search "is " and google suggested "Is Daniel Tosh gay?" I've never heard of Mr. Tosh, but there you have it.

So I went through the alphabet, it's actually pretty funny:

"Is Anderson Cooper gay?"

"Is Brenda Song pregnant" (I've never heard of her, either.)

"Is croup contagious?"

Then the one about Mr. Tosh, and after that "Is Darrenn Criss gay?" (I don't know him, either. Jeesh, I must be old.)

And on it goes with lots of questions about people being gay or pregnant. O was my favortie, "Is oatmeal gluten free?"

[nyanainc]

what is the Mechanical turk?

[nyanainc]

Thanks for sharing your opinion Syed! I like active members on seomoz!

[riplash]

I've noticed more and more companies doing this on TV advertising campaigns of late - instead of giving out a campaign specific URL, as was the done thing maybe 2-5 years ago, companies are increasingly likely to give a specific search term out.

I wondered about the motives behind it, and recognised that this may be one of them.

[wrttnwrd]

I'm late to this particular party, but here's an approach that's worked for us  helped a friend in reputation management crises:

First, you need to get some indexed content for the phrase you're going to insert into suggest. I'll go with "Gibble Gibbet".

1. Add a page to your own site;
2. Or even better, find a phrase for which you already have indexed content.
3. Either way, get some Twitter/other social traffic going to ensure it stays indexed.

Now, you need to get some search volume:

1. Don't think of this in terms of directly generating search volume. Instead, think of this as a social engineering experiment.
2. Determine what phrase you want to show up in search suggest. I'm sticking with "Gibble Gibbet".
3. Create a test on a service like Amazon Mechanical Turk. Tell everyone involved you need them to tell you the first 2 results they see when they type in "Gibble Gibbet".
4. Send out the test to 5,000 or more people.

Depending on the term, the search volume around it, and the competition among different queries, this should get you what you're looking for.

Not that I've ever done this.

It was a friend of mine.

[KeriMorgret]

Ian, thanks so much for sharing that experience from a friend of yours. Great to see you here in Q&A!

[Danapollo]

I know this is an old feed - but on the subject of influencing the 'Search Suggest'... has anyone played the 'LogosQuiz' game on the iPhone - if not, hear me out, because it is interesting (I think...)!

The game is pretty simple, you've just got to guess company logos. However, you are able to obtain hints - and these hints come in the form of full sentences.

Now then, I was stuck on a few of these last night and thought I'd ping one of the 'hints' over to google. I literally got 2 words into it and the FULL hint (about 10 words) was suggested (something about computer software manufacturer on east coast of somewhere or other...).

I know this isn't about 'how' to influence the Search Suggest - but just look at how powerful the 'social sphere' is when a game like this is able to have such control over the suggestions (they're missing the trick with marketing though, because the game developers don't rank for the hints!).

Just thought I'd share that with you guys - something a little light-hearted and kinda fun!

[skehoe]

Great idea your friend had.

I too have a friend who successfully changed Google suggest by indexing pages on a variety of websites & news distribution channels for more desirable keywords.

I have noticed if you don't teach Google what to suggest then it will sometimes offer 'negative' suggestions even if there is no content to be found.  To avoid a 'crisis' you a best off choosing your own keywords and teach google what is relevant and what is not

[Talooma]

There was a very clever Adwords campaign by Converse. Used Adwords very intelligently.

[Yoav_Vilner]

White hat methods: Pay for a commercial via TV or radio to convince people to search for your brand+positive keyword.

Ask all of your family, friends or colleagues to search for "your brand+positive keyword".

Co-operate with bloggers and online partners to search for "your brand+positive keyword".

Start a social campaign (FB contest or PPC) to convince people to search for "your brand+positive keyword".

black hat methods - sadly some people take advantage of black hat methods on this one, such as paying for AOL's Mechanical Turks system.

[NikolasNikolaou]

I guess a good "trick" in my opinion would be to create a contest and promote it through image sharing sites like pinterest, tumblr, or youtube , facebook and any other social site or method you can get traffic from with an attention grabbing image * reshare to win * and stating the contest as a search a term contest (no link at all) to check out the prizes .Freebies always seem to drive crazy traffic, why not use it to your advantage as a influence on search suggest.

Another influence I use to build brand awareness and in a way search suggest is stating the company/website name (semi emd though) instead of a link.

I think that some people don't seem to get the methodology of Seo, creating virality and building a brand. It has to stand out from classic onpage optimisation and offpage link building. THINK OUT OF THE BOX.

The one thing that gave me an edge as a marketer in my industry when I first started on ( a revenue sharing site ) was a variation of a industry keyword that I built up from >10 searches monthly up to 4400 exact match searches monthly (singular phrase) and 1300 exact match (plural) the long tail is even more in less than 9 months by posting about recommendations for those products in industry relative forums building up in a way my "own" keyword .

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

Oh well call me a joke if you want but nothing comes in my mind except lmgtfu.com

The best way to push someone button... Actually push the button... literally...

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=literally+push+the+button....

[DavidOriol86]

This post is deleted!

[Nexa]

Nice Workaround

[NickSamuel]

I suppose you're correct but it's all relative to the keyword in question, isn't it?